An action thriller by Jock Miller
Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.
The perfect energy storm is sweeping over the United States: Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown has paralyzed nuclear expansion globally, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill has stalled deep water drilling, Arab oil countries are in turmoil causing doubt about access to future oil, the intensity of hurricanes hitting the Gulf’s oil rigs and refineries has intensified due to global warming, and the nation’s Strategic Oil Supply is riding on empty.As the energy storm intensifies, the nation’s access to Arab oil, once supplying over sixty percent of our fossil fuel, is being threatened causing people to panic for lack of gas at the pumps, stranding cars across the country and inciting riots.
The U.S. Military is forced to cut back air, land, and sea operations sucking up 58% of every barrel of oil to protect the nation; U.S. commercial airlines are forced to limit flights for lack of jet fuel; and businesses are challenged to power up their factories, and offices as the U.S. Department of Energy desperately tries to provide a balance of electric power from the network of aged power plants and transmission lines that power up the nation.
The United States must find new sources of domestic fossil fuel urgently or face an energy crisis that will plunge the nation into a deep depression worse than 1929.The energy storm is very real and happening this very moment. But, at the last moment of desperation, the United States discovers the world’s largest fossil fuel deposit found in a remote inaccessible mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve surrounding six and a half million acres.
Preventing access to the oil is a colony of living fossil dinosaurs that will protect its territory to the death.Nobody gets out alive; nobody can identify the predator--until Dr. Kimberly Fulton, Curator of Paleontology at New York’s Museum of Natural History, is flown into the inaccessible area by Scott Chandler, the Marine veteran helicopter pilot who’s the Park’s Manager of Wildlife. All hell breaks loose when Fulton’s teenage son and his girlfriend vanish into the Park.
Will the nation’s military be paralyzed for lack of mobility fuel, and will people across America run out of gas and be stranded, or will the U.S. Military succeed in penetrating this remote mountain range in northwestern Alaska to restore fossil fuel supplies in time to save the nation from the worst energy driven catastrophe in recorded history?
10 Essential Books Featuring Dinosaurs in Science Fiction: Thunder Series by James F. David (1995)
Starting with the novel Footprints of Thunder and continuing in Thunder of Time and then most recently Dinosaur Thunder, this series imagines strange temporal inconsistencies seeing a contemporary world colliding with aspects of the Cretaceous world. Dinosaurs are eating people and jungles are randomly popping up everywhere. In the latest book, a T-Rex has been discovered on the moon. We’ve always wondered what else was on the moon. Now we know.
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10 Essential Books Featuring Dinosaurs in Science Fiction: Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (1864)
The title of this one is one big giant spoiler-alert for its premise. Impatient and irritable Professor Lidenbrock and his cohorts descend into darkness and encounter all sorts of awesome critters along the way. However, like The Lost World, many of the prehistoric beasts aren’t actually dinosaurs, but instead, other forms of ancient life. For example: a plesiosaurus (hi Nessy!) and a Pterosaur make appearances. Should this get the credit for being the first work of SF to feature dinosaurs instead of Doyle’s The Lost World. Technically speaking, the answer is probably no. While emotionally speaking, the answer might be yes.
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10 Essential Books Featuring Dinosaurs in Science Fiction
This novel is a sort of sideways sequel to The Lost World, insofar as it takes place in an alternate universe in which the events of that book actually happened. This means capturing real life dinos and putting them in circuses totally destroys the careers of stop-motion animators like Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen. Sad! However, eventually the dinosaur circuses start to slow down, causing all sorts of children’s birthday parties to totally suck. (We might be kidding about that last part.)
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10 Essential Books Featuring Dinosaurs in Science Fiction
Here, the classic notion that dinosaurs might still be among us is executed wonderfully by Sherlock Holmes scribe Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Lost World primarily concerns a hidden plateau in Venezuela where prehistoric creatures somehow survived extinction. Serving as the inspiration for several subsequent dinos-in-the-present-day stories, this book interestingly only features four technical dinosaurs: Iguanodon, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and Megalosaurus. Any other creatures Professor Challenger and co. encounter are other types of prehistoric reptiles.
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10 Essential Books Featuring Dinosaurs in Science Fiction: Jurassic Park By Michael Crichton (1990)
This book is about some folks who clone dinosaurs and then stick them on an island. As opposed to the film version, the character of Ian Malcolm dies in this book, only to be resurrected in the book version of The Lost World (no relation to the Conan Doyle novel, other than dinos.) This makes Crichton’s The Lost World more of a direct sequel to the film version of Jurassic Park than his own novel. (Read more on why the film version of the Lost World might be better than the book here.) However, Jurassic Park, the book AND film, both still rock.
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10 Essential Books Featuring Dinosaurs in Science Fiction
Dinosaur Planet by Anne McCaffrey (1978)
This little-known McCaffrey effort was written in the early days of her formulating her Pern series. The novel concerns a group of space travelers who “discover” a planet called Ireta which they hope to mine for awesome previous jewels. They find a bunch of dinosaurs and mutineers instead. A sequel called The Survivors (or sometimes Dinosaur Planet II) was published in 1984, but work on the Pern series meant McCaffrey never returned to this world.
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